Down & Dead In Dixie (Down & Dead, Inc. Series) Read online

  “I picked up on it, too. He pushed way too hard, wanting to know where we were going. Rachel, I trust. Chris? Not so much. He’s a little secretive. But we’ll talk about that later.” Mark ditched the pirate patch and wig, tossed them into the backseat, then finger-combed his hair while cranking the engine. “First, you’ve got some explaining to do, and you’d better get started. Just so you know, I’m trying hard not to explode here, but frankly, I’m having to work at it. The only thing that’s keeping you in this car right now is that I know Rachel. She helped you, setting up this escape and she wouldn’t have, and she sure wouldn’t have involved Chris, without good reasons. So tell me, Daisy Grant,” Mark paused and nailed me with an expression more flat than any I’d ever seen on his face. “What reasons do you have for your actions that’s worth everything I’ve worked for and ever had in my life?”

  Oh, he was hostile all right. Beyond angry and upset. More like, livid on steroids, and it was justified. I cleared my voice. “I don’t have a reason worth any of it.”

  From his dropped jaw, that answer he didn’t expect. “You cost me everything for nothing? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No. I didn’t intend to cost you anything.” Tears threatened but I fought them hard. There was a time to mourn, but this definitely wasn’t it. This was a time for truth—and for watching someone who had been only kind and good and caring come to hate you and resent ever having met you. The kicker was I’d earned every bit of his bitterness and resentment and more.

  “Daisy, I’m not amused.”

  “I wasn’t trying to amuse you. I really didn’t intend any of this. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me and you think I’d really dump all this on your head deliberately?”

  “No, I don’t. But I’m afraid I don’t really know you. I thought I knew you well. But do I? How much of all you told me was true?”

  “All of it,” I said. “I just didn’t tell you my brother was Jackson and that you knew him. I didn’t tell you what I was running from for the same reason I didn’t tell Chris where we were going. He’d be at risk.”

  “I don’t think so.” Mark slanted me a telling look. “You had a feeling, you said.”

  “That’s beside the point. If I had a bellyful of bad feelings about him, I still wouldn’t want him or Rachel hurt.”

  When Mark passed the same property for the third time, he growled. “I can’t think. Where are we going?” He crossed the intersection and pulled out from between two shabby buildings. “You do have a plan, of course, though I told Chris you didn’t. You’d always have a plan . . . wouldn’t you?”

  “Generally, yes, I would always have a plan. Surprises have never been fun experiences in my life. They generally end with me in pain so I try my best to avoid them.”

  Something softened in him, but he called back the shield he’d thrown up to protect himself from me. “Fine. No surprises. Am I allowed to know where we’re going so I can stop driving in circles?”

  “Florida,” I said. “Dixie, Florida.”

  “Dixie? Where is that?” He frowned. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Up in the panhandle, near the Alabama state line.”

  “Fine.” He took the I-10 ramp and headed toward Mississippi. “And we’re going to Dixie because…?”

  If he didn’t like my other explanations, he’d definitely hate this one. I tried and failed to find a way to make it easier to stomach. “There’s a man there who will help us die.”

  Mark stomped the brake and swerved to a stop on the shoulder. “What?”

  I spoke slowly and distinctly. “There’s a man there who will help us die.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He let out a heavy, thick sigh. “We can die, staying right here.”

  I frowned at him. “Not really die. Just get-a-fresh-start die.”

  “We’re going to fake our deaths?” He looked torn between disgust and disbelief.

  Pulling on something Lester had said once, I repeated it to Mark. “Sometimes to live, you gotta die.”

  It took Mark a long second to absorb that. “Great. Terrific.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Stop saying that. Would you just stop saying that?”

  The thread taut, he veered closer to snapping it again. I gentled my voice, hoping he’d reduce his from an ear-splitting roar. “We can’t go back, Mark. They will kill us.”

  “I kind of figured that out when they blew up Jameson Court.” He pressed on the gas and merged into traffic.

  “They’re not going to let us go forward. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. As long as I’m alive, I’m a threat to Tony Adriano and his father and Edward’s dad knows it. The authorities want them all, and they’ll use me to get them, Mark.”

  “I get it. The only hope for a life is to leave this one in the dust.” He glanced over at me. “Now they want me dead, too.”

  “Yes.” Hard to accept, but true. “I’m so sor—“ Recalling his objection, I paused and tried again. “I sincerely regret involving you in any of this. I didn’t know about your connection to Edward or that either family formerly operated in New Orleans. I thought it would be perfectly safe or I’d never have come to Jameson Court.”

  “I was a link to Craig that wouldn’t be tracked to Jackson. You’d have someone without marking them for a target.”

  I swallowed hard. “Yes. I didn’t want to be totally alone.”

  That confession took a little wind out of his sails. “I believe you and I understand, but I’m not going to lie. I’m not happy with what’s going on. My life’s been high-jacked, Daisy.” He dragged in a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “But, I have to say, as angry as I am, I’m still not sorry you came.”

  The tears I’d blinked back and kept at bay brimmed and spewed forth like a gusher. I let them, not daring to wipe them away because that Mark would definitely notice. Instead, I relied on the darkness to conceal them from him.

  He checked his mirrors and pressed harder on the gas to pick up speed. “Okay, I’ve doubled around enough to feel confident we’re not being followed anymore.”

  “Were we being followed?”

  He nodded. “An old clunker of a car. But I lost it.”

  “When? I didn’t see it.”

  “You’ve been crying so hard you wouldn’t have seen much of anything, Daisy.” He flicked on his blinker and passed a green truck. “We’ll go to Dixie. On the way, I’ll hear you out. Then we’ll decide what to do.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “I’ll drive, you talk. And, I’m warning you, you better not utter so much as a single word that isn’t the absolute truth or so help me I’ll dump you out in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road.”

  He’d never do that, and we both knew it. But he wanted to mean it, and I couldn’t blame him. All things considered, he was taking these developments pretty well.

  “That includes lies by omission and for protection. Those days are over. Talk. Now—and I wouldn’t mind a little reassurance that you’ll tell me the whole truth so I don’t have to listen to all this and wonder.”

  Okay, he was taking these developments reasonably well. My ears would ring for a week, but in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t bad. In his position, I don’t think I’d handle any of this nearly as graciously much less all of it. I’d be chomping at the bit to rip him apart for costing me everything. “I promise to tell you the whole truth.” I lifted and then lowered my right arm. “I guess it all started when I screwed up my death—my first death.”

  “Your first . . . what?”

  Lost already, bless his heart. “My fault. Let me back up a bit to where it really all started. I was trying to skip that part—not to conceal it or anything. Thinking about it . . . unnerves me.”

  “Skip nothing. I’m a little unnerved myself. We’ll both just have to deal with it.”

  “Okay.” I took in a steadying breath and dumped my Cinderella mask into the backseat with his pirate patch. “I g
ot off work late that night, and I was so tired. I’d pulled a double and we were slammed both shifts. The whole time it was run as fast as you can to keep up. ” I caught a breath, then continued. “It didn’t help that I had on new shoes that pinched and gave me blisters. By the time I clocked out, I was hobbling.” He said he wanted it all, so I did my best to spare no details. “Anyway, I’m walking to my car and I hear tires squeal. I spun to look, my heel got stuck in the crack in the sidewalk and I fell.”

  Now he looked lost. “Your fall has Victor Marcello and Lou Boudin after you?”

  Mark knew Lou, too. Now how would he know Lou? Through the restaurant most likely. Lou was too old to have been in school with Mark and Edward and Rachel. “Sort of. Well, actually, no, not the fall.”

  “Daisy?” His warning grumble scraped at my ears.

  “Be patient. I’m trying to be exact and that’s hard, you know?”

  “It’s not hard. Losing everything in your life in a finger-snap, that’s what’s hard. Talk.”

  “I’m trying.” A little heat of my own escaped. I warned myself to get back in control; I had no right. “You see, when I fell, I saw a man across the street, standing under the streetlight like he was waiting for someone. The car with the squealing tires barrels down the street, screeches to a stop, and these two men inside it start shooting. They shot the guy standing under the light dead. That’s what started all this.”

  “Edward was the guy standing under the streetlight?” Mark guessed.

  I nodded.

  “And you called the cops?” His incredulity matched Lester’s.

  “I did.” When Mark groaned, I went on and told him every detail I could recall of everything that had happened between then and now. I held back nothing. Not a single thing.

  He listened mostly, but somewhere between being mugged and being told my clothes stash on the beach had been found, he silently passed me the Grant half-dollar I’d asked him to give to Craig Parker.

  He knew my predisposition to rubbing it when anxious, and that he gave it to me was a very good sign that I wouldn’t be walking to Dixie.

  * * *

  DIXIE, FLORIDA LOOKED more like a village than a town.

  Surrounded by woods on three sides and a lake on the fourth, it wasn’t exactly laid out for high speed or dense traffic. The closest town of any size was thirteen miles away, and it didn’t warrant a pinprick on most maps. That’s not to say Dixie didn’t have its charm. It did, in that small-town Americana way. Mayberry-ish with white picket fences and old-oak lined streets and charming bungalows with front porches littered with wooden rockers and hanging baskets of flowering plants that would, no doubt, be heavy with colorful blossoms in spring and all summer.

  We went through the sole traffic light and down four or five blocks into an historical-type district of post World War II homes that had been restored. “Pretty neighborhood,” I said, eyeing a tire swing tied to a low-slung tree limb. A bicycle lay across the brick sidewalk. Obviously, this wasn’t a high-crime area. “When I get a home, I’m going to put up a fence like that.”

  “Did you develop a picket-fence fondness from one of your foster parents?”

  “What?” I glanced from the houses to Mark.

  He shrugged. “You seem to have picked up something from all of them. I just wondered if you liked the fence because one of them had a picket fence.”

  Interesting observation. I had picked up things from each of the foster parents. Some were the kind of skills you talked about, others were the kind you tried to forget. But I hadn’t thought about associating things I love with any of them. I needed to think on that, but not for this. My fondness for picket fences belonged to me alone.

  They marked a friendly boundary. What stood inside the fence was mine. It belonged to me. I haven’t had much that belonged to me, so that carried a lot of weight. “No, I didn’t develop a fondness for them from anyone. I just like them.” I started to stop there, but I’d promised myself to keep no more secrets from Mark. “Did I ever tell you that I used to keep a notebook full of pictures I’d cut out of magazines?”

  “No, you didn’t. What kind of pictures?”

  “All kinds. It was an eclectic collection of things I loved about houses. Kitchens, lamps, even stepping stones in the gardens.” Revealing that cut closer to the bone than I expected. Had I ever before shared my dream of a home with anyone else? No, not that dream. Not even with Jackson. Wanting a real home was just too personal, and it meant too much. “Now I take photos.”

  “Of all the things you want in your home?”

  Not a house. He’d switched it to a home. With everything going on, the odds of me ever having a real home looked slimmer all the time. I choked back a sudden lump in my throat and nodded. But how like Mark to not mention that, and to know it wasn’t just a house I wanted but a real home.

  He switched lanes, passed an SUV in serious need of new shocks, judging by the way it bounced, and then pulled back into the right lane behind a blue truck hauling a refrigerator. That was just downright strange. Who hauled a refrigerator around in the backend of a pickup at three in the morning?

  “How many photos have you taken?”

  “About nine hundred—give or take twenty or so.” I sounded obsessive. And maybe I am, but it didn’t seem obsessive or excessive to me. Not in my position. For somebody who’s had a home, it would set gut alarms to firing off. But for a woman who’d never had a home? Nope, not strange in the least. Totally normal.

  He half-chuckled. “You’re very specific on what you love.”

  “You bet, I am.” Wasn’t everyone? Shouldn’t they be? I wondered and shifted on my seat, tapped the vent to blow its stream of warm air away from my face. “If you care enough to dream it, then dream it right.”

  “Good point,” he said. “I have a question for you, Daisy.”

  “Okay?” This was going to be bad. Suck-lemon, stink-a-week rotten. I could hear his hesitation and feel the bad vibes radiating off him every bit as much as the air vent’s stream. “Go ahead. Ask.” I braced.

  He looked over. “How long does it take to get used to home not being there anymore?”

  My heart squeezed as if captured in a mighty fist. I sensed more than heard his sadness in his voice. Adrift. Abandoned. After losing his family, abandonment was the ultimate horror for Mark. “You look a little . . . frazzled. Do you need for me to candy coat it? Or can you take the truth?”

  “It’s a big adjustment,” he defended himself. “But always tell me the truth. You promised, remember?”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” But boy, did I wish the truth on this wasn’t so ugly? Absolutely. “Honestly, you never get used to it. You get better at coping with knowing the truth won’t ever change and there’ll always be a part of you that feels betrayed and abandoned and a little lost. That makes it bearable.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “I know.” I reached for his hand. He let me cover it with mine.

  “It’s tough to take as a adult. I can’t image what it was like for you as a kid.”

  “It was hard. It’s still hard.” I patted his hand in apology for passing along the bad news. “No matter how old you are, eventually you work your way around to the facts and you accept that your life is what it is, and you have a choice. You can make the best of it, or not. It’s your call.” I adjusted the vent so it stopped drying out my eyes. “I try to make the best of it.”

  “And you dream of the life you want with your pictures.”

  I nodded.

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  “I don’t know how good it is, but it’s the best I have to offer.” It was, and I hoped he’d heed it. Otherwise, the hunger for what wasn’t—home, family, roots—would eat him alive.

  “Did we miss the town?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked out, but saw nothing man-made, only clusters of trees and natural brush. “I’ve never been here.”

  Mark glanced over. “That’
s right. The crazy old man . . . Lester sent you here.”

  “Lester’s not really crazy,” I said, determined to be totally honest on everything. Mark deserved that, considering, and, feeling lost, I think he needed it even more. “I didn’t know he wasn’t crazy until all this stuff happened, but—look! There it is.”

  Ahead stood a roundabout dead-center of an old-fashioned town square. The buildings surrounding it were businesses—all red-brick, all with discreetly lighted, painted signs. A café, post office, shoe store, candle shop. Charming. “This has to be it.”

  “So we’re looking for . . .?”

  This admission would earn me a weird look and likely a lot more. “The funeral home.” I glanced from one side of the street to the other. “I doubt it’d be on the Town Square, though. That’d strike too many people as morbid, wouldn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t want to walk past a funeral home every time I came in to town,” Mark said. “There’s a store on the corner. It’s open. We can stop and ask—”

  “Let’s don’t. We don’t want to be remembered as the pirate and Cinderella.” I pointed to a corner away from the store. “Try a couple side streets. It’s a small town. We’ll find it.”

  On the third side-street, Mark wove around a parked SUV and then said, “There it is. Dixie Funeral Home. Paul Perini, Director. There can’t be two of them in a town this size.”

  “I don’t know about that, but this is the one we want.” Mark rounded a little bend, and parked right out front of the funeral home was Emily’s old clunker. “Oh, no.” My heart rate tripled. “Don’t stop. Make the block!”

  Mark kept going. “What’s wrong? Why didn’t you want to stop?”

  “Lester’s there.” As we rode down the street, my mind flew into overdrive. “Why would Lester be in Dixie?”

  “Whatever it is has to be bad for him to risk leading Marcello or Adriano to you.”